Just wanted to share how absolutely easy french bread can be if you have flour, water, salt, yeast, an oven, and butter.

Here's my go-to recipe and technique which involves very little kneading, contrary to everything you know about bread (eta: I am a lot of things, but not this middle-aged gentleman from the Heartland somewhere, I just like this guy's recipe):

My only change is that about 15 minutes into baking I take a cold stick of butter from the fridge and rub the loaves down, letting the butter melt onto the bread, then finish baking.

I'm going to edit again, because I like to skim a recipe's ingredients before I commit a whole 4 minutes of my life to watching a video:

4cups all purpose flour1 T plain old table salt1 T or 1pkg yeastwarm water - anywhere from about 3/4 of a cup to 2 1/2 cups or so, depending on humidity, dryness of your flour, etc - this isn't that tricky, I swearabout a half stick of butter, if you puts the butter on its skin, as I do